Building Income Through LibrePCB: A Personal Story
The past 3 years were very exciting for me and the LibrePCB project, completely different to the previous 10 years of the project’s existence. With this blog post I’d like to give you some insights about my "new" everyday life.
Usually I don’t like to expose my life in the internet — maybe you aleady noticed this, if you ever tried to find me on social media platforms. Though there’s nothing to hide, I just don’t feel comfortable to share my life with the public (and with all the profit-oriented companies grabbing that data). But since it’s also related to LibrePCB — which I obviously do want to share with the public — let’s make an exception for this blog post (well, I still couldn’t resist to add this post to the disallow list of robots.txt).
Until mid 2022, my life was kind of "normal". Full-time employed as an electrical engineer, I was going to work 5 days (42 hours) per week, and worked on LibrePCB in my free time evenings, on weekends and during holidays (I don’t know what else holidays are intended for…). But after doing this routine for many years, some things have changed over time, and I realized today’s industry is only interested in profit rather than developing useful and reliable products in a meaningful way. I felt like this is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life, so I quit my safe job with no idea how I will generate the income needed to pay the rent, food, insurances etc. The only thing I knew, was that I wanted to work harder on LibrePCB, as I was (and still am) convinced the world needs a proper open-source EDA tool. This was the moment my life got interesting…
